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Basic information for newbies on safeguarding your privacy online.
This could help you out in preventing further data collection; worth the read.
When it comes to safeguarding your privacy online, what do you need to do? You need to prevent data collection.
The goal of commercial surveillance is to track you from site to site. Someone does a search in Google. Someone visits a website. Making the connection that YOU are the one who conducted both of these activities is their goal.
How do you prevent this? You prevent this by preventing data collection on EVERY site you visit.
The most important data collectors are the third party sites. For example, let’s say you go to a news site like Fox News or CNN. When you go to that site, you’re making a connection with the server(s) where that site is stored. That server has the pictures, the text, and the HTML code that tells your browser how to display the page.
So when you visit a site, your browser sends a request for all that stuff for whatever page you’re visiting.
The site you actually went to - Fox News or CNN - that’s the first party site. However, there are also third party sites. Usually, you’ll find the big companies you’ve heard of like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter. They’re running scripts on most pages you visit. Those scripts are collecting data on you. Those are the ones who are present on each site you visit.
Since you’ve opened (your browser did it for you based on the page you’re visiting) connections to their servers, they can collect whatever they want. You’ve given them permission by connecting with their server.
So what do they collect? Your browsing history, cache, cookies, your browser information (which browser and version), your OS information, your screen resolution, any Add Ons, Plugins, fonts installed, your IP address, your MAC address, your screen resolution, the size of your browser window, how you uniquely use a keyboard and mouse, how images are drawn by your browser in canvas, and anything else that they can dream up that might help uniquely identify you. Several hundred different points of data actually. And according to studies, they only need to collect 15 points of data in order to identify you precisely.
So yeah, it doesn’t matter WHATSOEVER what search engine you use. You don’t use Google? Fantastic! But Google is invisibly present on EVERY SINGLE WEBSITE YOU VISIT. And if you aren’t blocking them there, who gives a shit if your browsing session started on DuckDuckGo or StartPage? Google is STILL tracking you anyway.
And not just Google. Thousands - I shit you not - THOUSANDS of companies are in the business of collecting data. Ad blockers that work by lists of trackers have several tens of thousands of domains in them that they block requests to.
Do you want to know the worst part? Even if you block Google, the FIRST party site you visit might be collecting your data and SELLING it to Google. “Hey Google, we don’t know who this visitor was, but here’s all the data we collected on them.” “Oh him? We know who that is. Thanks!” Then they sell it to other companies, or just give it away to their customers.
Have you heard of real-time bidding? Dear God. It’s breathtaking.
Google has an ad company called DoubleClick. Their ads are on almost every site you visit. You certainly won’t be able to find a website on the first page of the search results for ANY Google search that doesn’t have a DoubleClick ad on it. (See how they operate? Google search engine’s purpose is to drive traffic to THEIR ads!)
When you click on a link for a site that has a DoubleClick ad on it, Google quickly gathers all the information about your computer that they can, and then blast it out to their customers. “Hey, customers - this person has been shopping for shoes for the last half hour. Here’s their income level. Would you like to bid on ad space on the page that’s currently loading on their browser?” And then their customers, hundreds of them, who received that data, BID on the ad space. Highest bidder - in this case, probably a shoe company - will win the bid and their ad will be placed on the page.
All of this happens WHILE THE PAGE IS LOADING.
This is why everyone is obsessed with faster in
internet speeds. Google wants internet speeds to be faster. Why? SO that they can get away with doing more stuff invisibly in the background without you noticing. Haven’t you noticed how speeds keep getting faster but your experience hasn’t really changed much? But install a good ad blocker, and you’ll see that EVERY page loads faster. Noticeably faster.
People are like, “Oh, Google doesn’t care about ME.” Yes, they do. They have a dossier of data just for you with all your data in it. Maybe a human doesn’t look at it, but they COULD, and it is certainly being compiled.
So no, it doesn’t matter much which search engine you use.
What matters is whether you’re paying attention to the collection taking place in your browser. What matters is whether you BLOCK that shit. If you’re not paying attention to it, visibly looking at it with an interface like uMatrix, everything else you’re doing doesn’t matter one bit.
So that means if you’re a noob - just install uMatrix. Set it to block everything. EVERYTHING. Each page you go to will be broken. It won’t load correctly. Open up one thing at a time, refreshing the page each time, until the page loads correctly. Keep everything else blocked.
This will be a HORRIBLE experience at first. You’ll want to PUKE at everything you’re seeing, and you’ll get annoyed at having to refresh pages 10 times before you can view them. BUT - you’ll figure out what you can set to allow automatic and what you can’t. You’ll learn about what’s taking place in your browser, on your computer. And you’ll be in CONTROL of it.
Use Firefox, not Chrome. Google owns Chrome. It’s malware. They collect ALL your data, ALL your browsing activity. You’ll also want to add Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everywhere, and Cookie AutoDelete. Probably also DecentralEyes. Then you’ll also want to tweak Firefox’s about: config settings.
But if you JUST use Firefox with uMatrix and a VPN or Tor with uMatrix - that’s REALLY enough to get started.
Lots of people say that uMatrix is for Advanced Users Only. Beware! Danger! Confusing!
That’s what I thought at first too. But what causes you to climb the learning curve to BECOME an advanced user? Using uMatrix as I’ve described above.
Be sure to read their Wiki to understand how it works. You can also go to r/uMatrix if you want.
Use sites such as https://prism-break.org/en/ in order to see what to avoid or upgrade to in order to maximize internet security.
